DVD of the Week: “Guys and Dolls”

“Guys and Dolls,” one of the most celebrated of American musical comedies, premièred on Broadway in 1950. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of it (which I discuss in this clip) came out in 1955, and the stories of New York by Damon Runyon (who died in 1946), on which it was based, were already two decades old and an object of wry nostalgia. The musical genre, with its insertion of song and dance into comic drama, was hardly the pinnacle of Hollywood realism, but here Mankiewicz pushed its artifice to new heights with the arrantly stagebound flats that stood in for the Times Square of the day, albeit one inhabited by characters and infused with action from out of the past. Paradoxically, this artifice gave rise to a strangely heightened sense of immediacy: it thrust performance front and center, as if theatrically, and gave Mankiewicz’s distinctive cast—headed by Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons and Vivian Blaine—a proscenium-like showcase, and they make the most of it. Brando sings—not well, but sincerely—and carries off his role with a breathtakingly understated slyness; Simmons sings, well, and with a thrilling physical fury; Sinatra’s vocal swagger is as exhilarating as ever, on a stage that gives him room to strut. And the overall effect is to heighten the effect and the presence of Frank Loesser’s brash yet subtle and bluff yet intricate songs. It’s not filmed theatre, but the cinematic transfiguration of the theatrical experience.

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